The Library as Phantasmagoria: Demystifying Cognitive Labor and the Information Commodity in Scholarly Databases
Presentation | Thursday, June 12th, 2025 | 1:15pm – 2:15pm EST
Scholarly databases are widely regarded as repositories of expert knowledge that transcend one’s everyday experiences. This apparent “magic” of the database is contingent upon the erasure of its distinctly capitalist underpinnings: exploitation of cognitive labor and corollary rent-seeking practices of commercial publishers. Librarians are complicit in the ongoing reproduction of the myth, or more precisely, the phantasmagoria, of the transcendent database. However, we can leverage our professional authority to demystify the database within our academic communities. This presentation introduces Walter Benjamin’s theory of phantasmagoria and demonstrates its utility as a mode of anti-capitalist criticism through faculty development work and CIL instruction.
[This discussion will not be recorded.]
Presenter: Drew Wallace
Drew Wallace is a faculty Research and Instruction Librarian at Montclair State University in Montclair, New Jersey. Prior to completing his MSIS at Florida State University in 2022, he earned a BA in History at West Virginia Wesleyan College and MA in Political Science at Marshall University. His primary teaching, research, and service interests relate to critical information literacy and critical neurodiversity studies. His scholarship focuses on challenging the neoliberalization of academia and promoting accessibility in libraries through deconstructing the role of capitalism in the marginalization and commodification of neurodivergent persons.